Automation systems are used to control the behavior of an environment such as an industrial plant, an office building or a residential dwelling. Currently there is an increasing trend to automate various activities and task in our society. Industries such as the banking industry, the automotive industry, the oil and refining industry and transportation industry use computers and automation to control machines and other various devices during the performance of many tasks and processes. The application of automation control systems has expanded from large industries to small businesses and residential homes.
Home automation systems, or home management systems as they are sometimes called, commonly provide for control of lighting, heating and air conditioning, window shades or curtains, pool heaters and filtration systems, lawn sprinklers, ornamental fountains, audio/visual equipment, and other appliances. Home automation systems are frequently integrated with a home security system so that when a fire alarm is raised, for example, internal and external lights will be turned on. Security systems frequently include lighting control and other types of home automation as an option. Many larger homes incorporate a home theater that requires a certain amount of automation for convenient operation and this automation is often extended to other parts of the dwelling. In farms, the automation system will also control outbuilding heating and lighting and warn of abnormal conditions in automated feeding machinery and other equipment.
One form of automation system includes a central control unit that monitors environmental sensors and inputs from user controls and maintains a schedule of preprogrammed time-of-day and day-of-the week events. Inputs to the central control are provided by dedicated low-voltage wiring, for example, from door and window sensors, signals carried on power lines, RF signals, signals on existing telephone wiring and, occasionally, optical signals. The central control unit is controlled by a program that is either specifically built for the particular installation or a general-purpose program with a user interface that allows the owner or a technician employed by the owner to make certain types of modifications. The interfaces to these programs can be anything from strings of digits entered on standard touch-tone keypads, for example, Home Automation Inc.'s Omni Automation and Security System, to graphical user interfaces, for example, the Molex “Choices” software.
The communication between the central control unit and various devices can be through a variety of protocols. The Echelon Corporation has built home automation and industrial control apparatus based on a signaling protocol they refer to as LonWorks that uses a network of nodes each of which has one or more microprocessors. The system is designed to operate in a “cooperative computing” environment in which the individual nodes maintain their own programs. Programming of the individual nodes can be done by downloading new software from a temporarily attached lap top computer or by downloading software over the LonWorks network. A similar approach has been taken by CEBus and has been used in many custom installations for larger homes and office buildings. While such systems eliminate the central control unit, modifying the software still requires the use of a PC-based system and usually requires the user to acquire relatively expensive hardware and software and become proficient in the use of PC-based software.
The latest internationally accepted standard for residential communication is the Consumer Electronics Bus (CEBus). The Media used in a CEBus Network topology can vary between power-line wiring (PL), telephone wiring (TP twisted-pair), coaxial cable (CX), RF (radio frequency) and the like. It provides the standard for creating products and devices to communicate with each other, and should build intelligence into homes or any physical or virtual facility with smart products (aggregation of smart devices) in anticipating tomorrow's consumer needs. Though the intent of the original specification was directed at the residential market, the inventions disclosed here by its three inventors have envisioned a much more extensive application uses. The consumer can be any person, a firm, government agency, whatever or whomever has a need to communicate to smart devices.
The official name for CEBus standard is ANSI/EIA 600. At the core of the standard are the CAL (Common Application Language) and the Application Layer. It provides the basis of the interoperability between CEBus compliant devices and a transport independent version (Generic CAL) (Generic CAL) ANSI/739 that an integral part of the Home PnP (Plug and Play) ANSI/721 specification (which defines how networked products of various manufactures achieve interoperability regardless of the communication protocol used (CEBus, X-10, RS-232, IEEE-1934, TCP/IP etc.)
The devices that utilize these standards contain context data structures. Each CAL Context is a predefined data structure built from reusable objects, and represents a common consumer product function such as a tuner, time or temperature sensor. These context data structures are defined in a set of subsystems definitions that represent industry standard guidelines that define the behavior of the device, which is necessary to enable products to correctly use the subsystem models.
In a home, there are many appliances/devices that are powered by electricity, either AC or DC. At the present time, these devices do not have the ability to communicate with each other. In addition, there is no standard method to keep track of the current state of each device. The state attributes could be for example ‘on’, ‘off’, ‘channel’, ‘temperature’ etc. Currently some devices have a means to report information back to the manufacturer of the device activities of the device through proprietary channels, however there is no way currently for the various devices to communicate with each and no way for the homeowner to receive this type of status information. In addition, a homeowner or facility owner does not have a way to control these devices or who has access to these devices.
Electronic devices traditionally have two states either on or off. Today, with the use of Context data structures embedded within a device, non-persistent property characteristics are stored within the device. This property data is overwritten as changes to the device occur. Storage of this information outside this limited capacity of the device is necessary for any applied application. It is desirable to provide an automation system that has a central control unit that can enable various devices on the same system to communicate with each other. In addition it is desirable to have a standard method to keep track of the current and past states of each device on the system. It is another desire to have a system when the homeowner or facility owner can have access to and control these devices. In addition to these desires, it is also desirable to provide an automation system that is inexpensive, easily installed, easily programmable and reprogrammable. It is also desirable to provide an automation system that allows the incorporation of new and different, appliances and controllers without the system becoming obsolete. Lastly, it is desirable to provide a method that can implement instructions to automatically operate one or more devices on the network based on a set of operating statuses of devices on that network.